Going smokefree? Gone smokefree
I posted this as a guest on the Vapers In Power blog yesterday:
Yep, a CE4. As I mentioned in my story, a close friend of mine loaned me some hardware, mixed some basic juices and gave me some much-needed advice. I started out with 18mg/ml nicotine juice in that CE4, a blue one in case anyone was wondering, and set about reducing my daily cigarette intake. Looking back on those early days, and having experienced the old 510-T for a short while a few years previously, I certainly harboured doubts as to whether or not vaping would actually help me. After all, I wanted to seriously cut back on the number of cigarettes I was smoking, but not quit. I mean, in the week prior to actually getting the CE4 I had smoked almost 400 cigarettes. Half of that number disappeared over the weekend. I knew something had to change, but you know what?
I actually enjoyed smoking. Did I care that I’d just demolished twenty packs of Mayfair Superkings? Not really no. My wallet did, but I didn’t. I still had one of the multi-packs left, so there was still one hundred cigarettes in my ‘stock’. However, demolishing that many cigarettes had a seriously negative effect on me. I was coughing far more than ever before, I felt rough, my throat was raw and I’m pretty sure my clothes smelled like an old tobacconists shop.
It was those direct effects that made me think about cutting back heavily and even as far as considering the Q word. Now I’d considered quitting a few years previously, and even tried a year or two before that along with various other attempts, but I never really saw it through. After all, this time last year was a pretty crappy time and smoking gave me some comfort, some ritual I could escape in. Thing is, I didn’t really want to quit after all I enjoyed smoking, but didn’t enjoy the near constant barrage of “bad for you that” type commentary from co-workers and random people in the street. Getting those types of comments day in, day out everywhere I went made me feel isolated in my enjoyment. It was kind of depressing, why should I give up something I enjoy just to fit into a societal mould? Never mind the constant barrage of anti-smoking campaigns, which only served to make me continue to smoke with a “screw you” mentality.
At this time I was already making a conscious effort to cut back, heck I went from almost 60 a day back down to 15-20. But I still smoked far more than that regularly. Once I started with the CE4, within three days I went from 15-30 smokes a day to zero. It was really quite weird, I’d still head outside with a coffee to vape as it was part of the ritual of smoking at work. Soon after that first day of vaping exclusively I even stopped doing that regularly. I still occasionally pop outside and have a vape but that’s mostly because I want to go outside, stretch my legs and get some (relatively) fresh air and enjoy the limited sunshine this country has to offer. The fact that I had actually stopped smoking, as in the dreaded Q word never actually crossed my mind. Didn’t occur to me at all.